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Organization

Flagships

Philip Thornton joined the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) in 2010, first as Leader for Theme "Integration for Decision-making"; and, from January 2015, leading the Flagship "Institutions and Policies for Climate-Resilient Food Systems".

Philip Thornton has been working for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), since 1996. First as Coordinator of the Systems Analysis and Impact Assessment Programme and from 2002, based in Edinburgh, he has been involved with several integrated modelling and climate change impact projects in livestock systems in Africa.

After graduateing with a BSc (Hons) degree in Agriculture from Reading University and a PhD in Farm Management from Lincoln College, New Zealand, Philip Thornton spent three years as a Post-Doc at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, working on bioeconomic modelling of livestock production systems in Latin America. He was then based at the University of Edinburgh for three years working on crop and household modelling projects in Central America and southern Africa. In 1990, he joined the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) in Alabama, and was involved in projects in various countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.

He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Institute of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on systems modelling and impact assessment.

In the last ten years, consultancies undertaken for the World Bank, FAO, the Science Council of the CGIAR, IDRC, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and three UK Government Foresight Projects (Detection of Infectious Diseases, Global Food and Farming Futures, and Migration and Global Environmental Change).

He is on the Board of Directors of the International Consortium for Agricultural Systems Applications (ICASA), a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of GECAFS (Global Environmental Change and Food Systems programme), and Editor-in Chief of the journal Agricultural Systems.